Douglas Wilbur
No political culture is more slogan-saturated than China’s. When Xi Jinping stood before the United Nations (U.N.) in 2015 and declared China’s commitment to building a “Community of Shared Future for Mankind,” many Western observers heard a vague soft diplomacy platitude rather than a strategic signal. The slogan, however, functioned as a rhetorical trap, reframing China’s authoritarian model as morally legitimate and future-oriented while portraying liberal democracies as selfish and out of touch with humanity’s collective destiny.
From rural banners to urban subway screens, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) floods public life with concise ideological formulas designed to structure thought and shape behavior. These slogans are poetically engineered, often using rhythmic structures like wǔyán (five-character lines) and qǐyán (seven-character lines), serving as tools of mass persuasion, social discipline, and international signaling. Yet Western analysts often dismiss them as ornamental rather than strategic. Thus, the goal of this essay is to reveal the nature of slogans, identify the psychological mechanisms they operate through, and explain how the CCP understands and employs slogans as propaganda and communications.
What are Slogans and How do they Work?
A good comprehensive definition of a slogan is: “A slogan is a short, memorable phrase used in marketing, or political communication that encapsulates the essence of a brand, message, or ideological stance, aiming to influence perception and provoke recall through concise, persuasive language.” Slogans leverage formatting tools like brevity or rhythm to create cognitive shortcuts. They encapsulate the essence of a brand, message, or ideological stance in a few words. Brevity enhances a slogan’s encoding into memory by condensing complex information into compact and digestible chunks. This makes it more likely to be encoded and retrieved as a single, coherent mental image. Brevity also reduces cognitive load, allowing the brain to process and store messages more efficiently in the working memory.
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